Trump’s pal plotted to hire journalist for negative storiesPage SixFelix Sater — the Russian-born, real estate mogul who helped build Trump Soho — once looked to hire a journalist for $1,000 a month to post and blog negative stories about an enemy. Randi Newton, currently a dating columnist for the New York Observer …

Felix Sater — the Russian-born, real estate mogul who helped build Trump Soho — once looked to hire a journalist for $1,000 a month to post and blog negative stories about an enemy.

Randi Newton, currently a dating columnist for the New York Observer, met with Sater for an hour four years ago to discuss the job offer. “I had responded to an ad for content. This man, Peter, said he was working with Felix Sater,” Newton told me. She eventually met with Sater for more than an hour. “He was very charismatic. He said he worked with Trump,” she recalled.

A 2013 e-mail from Peter Loehfelm of the PJ Walter branding company to Sater states: “Randi will get in touch with Felix on the flow of report ability of the entire process she will embark on and will also journal the details for the reports she will submit.”

Newton said she was instructed to post her “take-down pieces” from different Kinko’s (FedEx Office stores) around the city so she couldn’t be traced by IP addresses.

But Newton was never told who her target was. “It never went to the next step. It was very shady.”

Sater, former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, is a central figure in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

“With the number of intelligence agencies that Mr. Sater has worked with, to think he suggested Kinko’s as a workaround for IP masking when inexpensive simple anonymizer software accomplishes the same goal puts this entire story in question,” Sater’s spokesman Ronn Torossian said.

“Mr. Sater has no recollection of this meeting.”

Loehfelm said Sater would have hired Newton “to have his own social media and press relations cleaned up. Not for another party.”

Everything you were afraid to ask about this suddenly important personHere’s the deep dirt on the Russian businessman who promised “Our boy can become president of the USA” – by BILL SCHEFT – SATURDAY, SEP 9, 2017 02:00 PM EDT

This week cable news began breathlessly practicing saying the name “Felix Sater” over and over again, after it leaked that he had conspired with Donald Trump and Michael Cohen to try to build Trump Tower Moscow during the election.

Who is this Sater guy? Where did he come from? Why haven’t you heard his name before?

Well, if you’ve been reading a site like Palmer Report, you’ve known full well who Felix Sater is and why he’s so crucial to all of this for a very long time.Palmer Report first began trying to connect the dots between Felix Sater, Russia and Donald Trump back in February. We weren’t the first. To be frank, it was rather easy to see that something was there.

Sater and Cohen had been exposed as part of the truly weird Kremlin plot to convince Trump to use blackmail material to oust the president of Ukraine, so Putin could install a puppet.

That plot was only derailed because Michael Flynn got himself fired for unrelated Russia reasons before he could put it on Trump’s desk. Sater had previously been convicted for Russian mafia money laundering. He’d also become an FBI informant at some point. It wasn’t difficult to see where this was all going.

That plot was only derailed because Michael Flynn got himself fired for unrelated Russia reasons before he could put it on Trump’s desk. Sater had previously been convicted for Russian mafia money laundering. He’d also become an FBI informant at some point. It wasn’t difficult to see where this was all going.

It was abundantly clear back then that Sater was the linchpin to unraveling Donald Trump’s connections to the Kremlin,

and that Sater and Cohen were in close cahoots when it came to those connections. The trouble: at the time, no one could piece together specifically what those connections were. Sater was confirmed to have been involved in some of Trump’s sketchiest real estate deals, such as Trump SoHo. Cohen was Trump’s attorney at the Trump Organization. But what were they doing together, and what did it have to do with the Kremlin?

This week the answer finally arrived: Felix Sater and Michael Cohen were trying to help Donald Trump get his Trump Tower Moscow built during the election.

Cohen even went so far as to contact the Kremlin for help. Sater bragged in an email that the project would get Trump installed in the Oval Office.

Now that the crucial missing piece is in place, everyone from Congress to the Special Counsel is using it to zero in on Sater to get him to flip on Trump. Things are finally in motion.

But if you’ve been playing close attention, you’ve known for the past eight months that it was going to come down to Sater,

his relationship to the Putin-controlled Russian underworld, and his relationship to Trump through Cohen.

Palmer Report is often among the first to highlight a Trump-Russia storyline that we know is going to important, even if we don’t yet know how it all fits together. Skeptics invariably question why some of our reporting still hasn’t yet been vindicated, weeks or months later. It’s because these things take time to unravel in full detail. But this was always going to come down to Sater. We told you that back in February.

Palmer Report is often among the first to highlight a Trump-Russia storyline that we know is going to important, even if we don’t yet know how it all fits together. Skeptics invariably question why some of our reporting still hasn’t yet been vindicated, weeks or months later. It’s because these things take time to unravel in full detail. But this was always going to come down to Sater. We told you that back in February.

Facebook sold ads to a Russian firm during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, according to sources familiar with the social network’s findings, with Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos writing that the ads “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.” The revelations are likely to prompt questions about the possibility of the Russians receiving guidance from the U.S. to interfere in the election, Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman report at the Washington Post.

The Senate House Intelligence Committee interviewed former national security adviser Susan Rice behind closed doors yesterday morning, with senators declining to reveal details of the meeting. Katie Bo Williams reports at the Hill.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has not asked to speak with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who met with Trump campaign officials at Trump Tower in June 2016, Veselnitskaya told NBC News, adding that no one from Mueller’s team has tried to contact her. Ken Dilanian, Richard Greenberg and Natasha Lebedeva report at NBC News.

A key figure involved in the salacious “Trump dossier” relied on his first amendment rights during testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee last month, according to recently released court documents, the individual avoiding revealing the sources for the dossier compiled by former British Intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Elias Groll reports at Foreign Policy.

The two sides of the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have been revealed this week and, as the committee prepares to interview key Trump campaign figures and contend with allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, it is unclear whether the Grassley who is a “fearless investigator ready to take on his own party” will emerge or the Grassley who is a “loyal member of the G.O.P.,” Karoun Demirjian writes at the Washington Post.

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Felix Sater is a growing problem for Donald Trump, who once said he wouldn’t know what Sater looked like. The Russia-born Sater recently said he sought deals for Trump in Moscow during the campaign, and today is surrounded by several men with checkered financial pasts.

A cast of convicts and disgraced businessmen, including a Russian émigré central to the probes into possible Trump campaign collusion with Moscow, has reassembled in a nondescript office here across from a commuter train station.

The office is rented by the engaging but elusive émigré, Felix Sater. He’s been front-page news of late for emails, now in the hands of congressional and federal investigators, detailing how he and Trump Organization attorney Michael D. Cohen sought a real-estate deal in Moscow during the presidential campaign. Sater, who had been involved in previous ventures with Donald Trump’s company, wrote a 2015 email to Cohen saying, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it.”

That bombshell late last month helped place Sater, who once described himself as “a very interesting guy,” at the heart of the ongoing Trump investigations.

And now a new McClatchy investigation reveals that Sater is againassociatedwith some of the individuals with whom he was implicated in FBI probes of stock manipulation on Wall Street on behalf of Russian and Italian mobsters in the late 1990s. Several of the people who were convicted or faced regulatory sanctions in those probeshave been working in the same suite as Sater on Haven Avenue in this affluent Long Island, N.Y., suburb.

The new information raises questions about Sater’s activities while he and Cohen were working on the potential Moscow deal, whom he was doing business with, and whether Cohen was aware of these connections.

The relationship between Cohen and Sater continued after the Moscow project: A year later, in January 2017, they drafted, with a Ukrainian politician, a Ukraine-Russia peace plan and delivered it to Trump’s then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The building directory lists two companies in Suite 205, Advance Capital, and Regency Capital Inc., which share a three-year lease that began in May 2016. The suite is upstairs from the greasy spoon Haven Diner, overlooking a Long Island Railroad station.

School kids attend language classes at the Japanese Culture Center, and an eyelash extension salon is located a few doors away. Suite 205 is the only unmarked one on the floor. There’s a video surveillance system out front and above the right side of the door is a mezuzah, a prayer symbol often affixed outside Jewish homes and businesses.

“They’re in and out, they travel a lot,” said an employee of a neighboring business who requested anonymity in order to speak freely.

Old friends

Advance Capital’s chairman, Gary Levi, is described by several who know both men as a longtime Sater associate. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Levi in 2003 with helping the publicly traded fashion company Candie’s, Inc., inflate its income statement to dupe investors. He consented to a cease-and-desist order and paid a $25,000 civil penalty.

The SEC said that Levi worked directly with Candie’s Chief Financial Officer Gary H. Klein, who a year later was barred by regulators from accounting work with publicly traded companies. (Klein was arrested in 2004 in West Harrison, N.Y., for sending explicit sadomasochistic AOL chat messages to what he thought was a 14-year-old girl. Florida lists him on its directory of registered sex offenders.)

Levi isn’t the only Advance Capital executive with a checkered past. The company’s vice president of business development is Salvatore Morreale, cousin of Sater’s co-conspirator in the stock fraud case, Salvatore Lauria.

Lauria and Sater were both arrested, their exploits chronicled in the 2003 book The Scorpion and the Frog.

In the book, Morreale is simply referred to a “Cousin Sal”; a family tree on Lauria’s wife’s Facebook page indicates they are indeed cousins. Morreale was indicted in November 1998 in a separate investigation that alleged he helped launder money through stock manipulation, working in tandem with White Rock Partners, an investment firm where the two men worked, and its successor company, State Street Securities.

A Nov. 20, 1998 sealed complaint from federal prosecutors outlines allegations against Salvatore Morreale, an associate at the time of Felix Sater and his business partner Salvatore Lauria.

Lauria, Sater and a Russian named Gennady “Gene” Klotsman were central figures in White Rock Partners. Klotsman reportedly is imprisoned in Russia for a spectacular diamond heist.

Morreale pleaded guilty in 1999 to multiple conspiracy charges, according to court documents and his records on Broker Check, run by the Financial Industry Regulation Authority, a self-regulating body for Wall Street.

Morreale and Levi did not respond to requests for comment.

Mystery deepens

Soon after McClatchy began asking questions about Advance Capital in late August, its website suddenly disappeared, replaced by a Go Daddy ad for domain names. Before it was taken down, the website boasted to potential customers that it offered “an alternative to conventional business loans.” It’s unclear whether the business is still operating.

Court documents in New York show the company made the equivalent of loans by taking small stakes in companies through cash advances, getting a percentage of a company’s credit-card daily billing revenues until reaching an agreed-upon payoff amount.

The company appears to operate in a lightly regulated space; it’s technically not considered a lender by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

Screenshot of a page on Advance Capital’s website before it was taken down in late August.

Wieder, Ben

Morreale’s presence at a Sater-linked company suggests that, at the very least, Sater continues to work in close proximity to his former circle. Persons familiar with operations say Sater keeps a desk at Advance Capital. A person familiar with the operation said the men sometimes met at Sater’s nearby home in Sands Point.

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M.N.: The following excerpt was changed in accordance with the changes in the original McClatchy Report article and at the request of Mr. Wolf, Mr. Sater’s attorney, on 9.9.17:

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McClatchy reporters twice visited Sater’s Sands Point home last month and were directed to send questions to his lawyer Robert S. Wolf, who then declined comment. Both Sater and his lawyer were sent a long list of detailed question. Sater asked that questions be sent to Wolf, but added a jab.

“I can see from your questions that your story will be mostly wrong and completely off base,” he wrote. When pressed to help correct what might have been incorrect, neither Sater or Wolf initially responded.

On Thursday, Wolf confirmed a relationship between Sater’s businesses and a Port Washington-based attorney, Arnie Herz, who had filed trademark paperwork on behalf of Advance Capital in April 2016.

▪ Herz has registered numerous Sater-related businesses, including Regency Capital Associates LLC in 2016, the business in the same suite as Advance Capital.

▪ Moreover, Herz registered several businesses tied to the Khrapunovs, a family accused by the government in their home nation of Kazakhstan of theft and money laundering, including via Trump-themed properties, a focus of an earlier McClatchy investigation into Sater. McClatchy also found that Sater assisted in efforts to get work visas for at least one person at a U.S. company funded by the fugitive family.

Wolf declined to provide further comment.

Kalsom Kam is another link between Sater and Advance Capital.

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OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS (ends in five grafs, pickup final section)

There’s yet another factor that links Sater to his former associates. This March — about a year after the Sater-Cohen efforts to build a tower in Moscow apparently fell apart — Lauria left a tribute to Alexander Oronov, another Russian emigre, on the website <a href=”http://Legacy.com” rel=”nofollow”>Legacy.com</a>.

Ukrainian politician Andrii Artemenko said Oronov had been an intermediary, who connected Artemenko to Sater and Cohen ; the three in late January drafted a secret peace plan for Ukraine and neighboring Russia without input from the State Department, and Cohen delivered it to Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn shortly before Flynn was fired as national security adviser for not being truthful about his own Russia ties.

Oronov, who founded the Baryshevskaya Grain Company in Ukraine, died suddenly in early March. Artemenko took to Facebook to suggest Oronov died because he knew too much, though a business associate who knew Oronov well said he died of cancer, and his death was not a mystery.

“My best to the family. We will never forget Alex, never, never, never,” said the message left in Lauria’s name.

Oronov was also father-in-law to Cohen’s brother Bryan. Multiple news reports earlier this year said the Cohen brothers and Oronov had invested together in Delaware-registered International Ethanol of Ukraine.

Past, present

Although Sater’s stock manipulation crimes were committed in the late 1990s, he was not sentenced until 2009. Sater never set foot in jail for those misdeeds, getting off with the $25,000 fine. FBI handlers testified on his behalf that he was instrumental in helping get Russian-made weapons off the black market. His local rabbi, when honoring Sater as Man of the Year in 2014, described Sater’s informant work with intelligence agencies.

While he was working with the government, Sater also had co-founded Bayrock Group with a Kazakh Tevfik Arif. That company in 2006 landed the rights to develop the vaunted Trump Soho project in Manhattan, and Trump-themed projects in Arizona and South Florida. Sater was forced to abandon his role in the Trump Soho after the New York Times revealed his past as a two-time criminal convict. The revelations tarnished the Trump name on what was to be a swank hotel and condo development. The project later dissolved into financial chaos and litigation.

But the information about Sater’s current activities brings new questions about Sater’s links to those in Trump’s inner circle, and even Trump himself. They also underscore why both Cohen and Sater might be of interest to the congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert Mueller who are looking at potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, something Trump has blasted as a witch hunt.

Trump later testified under oath in 2013 that if the Russian émigré sat across the room from him, “I really would not know what he looked like.” Yet last month’s email revelations show Sater continued to seek business for the Trump Organization later than previously believed.

“I have known Mr. Sater for several decades,” Cohen confirmed in a two-page statement on Aug. 28, shortly after the Sater-Cohen emails became public.

Cohen did not answer McClatchy’s questions about whether Sater represented himself or his firm Regency Capital (he lists himself as an “adviser” there in federal campaign finance filings) in his pursuit of a Trump-themed project in Moscow. Sater also did not answer that question, sent to his personal email. The Trump Organization, through its chief lawyer Alan Garten, declined to answer questions about Sater and pointed to an earlier statement.

Facebook Inc. said on Wednesday it had found that an influence operation likely based in Russia spent $100,000 on ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May. Facebook, the dominant social media network, said that many of the ads promoted 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages that it has now suspended. The ads spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights, instead of backing a particular political candidate,…

GENEVA (Reuters) – Syrian forces have used chemical weapons more than two dozen times during the country’s civil war, including in the deadly attack that led to U.S. air strikes on government planes, U.N. war crimes investigators said on Wednesday.

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – Victims of the attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Olympic Games were remembered by Germany and Israel on Wednesday with a memorial, following a long campaign by their relatives.

“I am not his bride, nor his groom,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said of President Trump yesterday, stating that each leader defends their national interests, also disparaging the U.S. for its treatment of Russian diplomatic facilities on U.S. soil. Andrew Roth reports at the Washington Post.

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Putin’s offer of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine “shows that Russia has effected a change in its policies that we should not gamble away,”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said yesterday,

welcoming Russia’s proposal for the U.N. mission to patrol the front line. Nataliya Vasilyeva reports at the AP.

–

“The delivery of weapons to a conflict zone doesn’t help peacekeeping efforts, but only worsens the situation,” Putin said yesterday, hitting back at Defense Secretary James Mattis for considering

supplying Ukraine with defensive weapons,

arguing that pro-Russian separatist “republics” in Ukraine could possibly “deploy weapons to other conflict zones.” John Bowden reports at the Hill.

M.N.: This article below, by John Sipher, is one of the important, clear, logical, and professionally written pieces of information on “Steele Dossier” and the related matters. It is regrettable, however, that the author did not mention the mysterious death of Oleg Erovinkin who is assumed to be and is referred to as the main source of information, and even the ultimate author of this document. This omission can be addressed in the future reports by Mr. Sipher. The overall issue of veracity and the ultimate sources of the “dossier” presently appear to be unresolved.

One of the practical points of this article which might be of some value to the investigators, despite its seeming triviality, is that the true understanding of the events in general, and this issue in particular, develops in its dynamics, in the process, in time, and very often becomes available, clears up, and matures in hindsight, with passing of time and the accumulation of the relevant information which was hidden and comes to light only now. We live, we learn, and we try to comprehend and to understand.